Transcribing

Random text and assorted bits of news and info to read or disregard at your leisure

After a bunch of tossed out design revisions and hours of messing with html, css and wordpress code, Version 2 of BlissfullyAware is launched (a little early) for the May 1st Reboot! …or CSS Reboot (whichever you prefer).

Style wise, things are fairly similar to the previous version of this site (screenshot). However, I’ve given it a bit of a face-lift, and introduced an all new color-scheme and expanded the site to include flickr photos and del.icio.us links. I’m not sure if I should call it a re-design or a re-align, but either way, I’m pretty excited about it.

Transparency

One area I’m VERY excited about is the site’s use of transparent PNG’s and CSS opacity. The way it’s all setup, it only takes a single background-color property to make the entire site change colors. For those of you out there with the Web Developer Toolbar installed on Firefox, go ahead and crack open the stylesheet (CSS > Edit CSS). In the #shell area, change the background-color value to whatever hex value you’d like. Nifty, huh! It’s going to come in handy for special events or holidays when I want to go orange or pink or blue or whatever.

Granted, there are a couple of drawbacks to using transparency in this manner… some items looking washed out, child elements always inheriting parent opacity levels, css transparency only working on items with a set width, etc, etc. That all being said, I still think it’s pretty rad.

Comments Abound

Delightful thoughts & feedback about this article

Dude, it’s looking sweet. I love the griddy-ness (is that a word). I think just a touch more contrast would help, lighter font color for main body text, etc. Overall though, it’s a sweet re-align, re-boot, re-design (whatever the cool kids are calling it nowadays).

Nice work, Josh. I must say, though, that while the flexibility of the transparency scheme you’ve set up is very cool, it’s a shame that it requires your site to be essentially monochromatic. I think a bit more contrast all around would go a long way.

Rob, I know what you mean… should’ve added that to the list of drawbacks. Still, like Kevin, I enjoy monochromatic color schemes, so I’m fine with it. Ultimately I’d like to include more photos/images with each post, so those should add some more color to the mix :)

Dave / May 9, 2007

I love this site it looks AMAZING. I can’t believe I just wrote that . . . because I am speechless! Aside from that this site is REAL eye-candy great job!

Joshua, you did a great work – congrats! Your site is fresh, pleasant and… unique. Yes, unique, because its structure and its menu theme.

Ty / May 18, 2007

Nice site, you really need a little bit more text contrast though, unless of course you want to make things hard to read. It’s asking alot of the user to bump up the text size or site really close to their monitor to try and read the fine print. There aren’t any legal contracts here are there.
Just fwiw [small]for-what-it’s worth[/smaller still]